CHAPTER IV
THE LANGUAGE
IN order to avoid too much observation, I got housed in an obscure hostelry that often accommodated foreigners. But none of the occupants knew my language, nor did I any of theirs. Gesture and mimicry supplied the defect for a time, and a few weeks sufficed to give me command of the vocabulary and syntax needed for the common intercourse of life, so easy seemed the tongue and so clear the articulation.
But the difficulty came at a later stage. I found I could not advance far without a teacher, and a man of the purer blood was procured to act as my tutor. I put on the dress of the marble city, and went daily to him for my lesson. What a revelation I had of the subtlety of language! It was like learning to skate; everything seemed to contribute to make me stumble or fall; and the effort to recover was more dangerous than collapse. Every word and phrase and idiom had countless variations of meaning dependent on the intonation of the voice and the peculiar gesture or facial expression adopted. There was a grammar and vocabulary of tone as well as of actual speech. And, besides this, gesture and grimace contributed their own shadings to every expression. The twitching of an eyebrow would turn “God bless you” into “God damn you.” A peculiar curl of the upper lip would change an inquiry into the state of a man’s health into a doubt as to the morality of his ancestors. A shrug of the left shoulder would make out of a fervid “I love you” as fervid an “I hate you”; whilst a shrug of the right shoulder would change it into “I despise you.” The eye had to be on the alert as well as the ear in finding out what a man meant; and every limb had to be watched as well as every feature of the face.
The dropping of the lid of the eye, left or right, could impart to a sentence, or even to a whole conversation, meanings so radically different that I became nervously conscious of every involuntary twitching as I talked; it might imply sinister intention, or confidence partial or complete; it might convey compliment or insult. It depended on the amount of the eye left uncovered, on the rapidity or slowness of the motion, and on the eye in which it took place. But, most bewildering of all, every depression of the optic shade varied in meaning according to the sex of the person addressed and the person addressing, and the presence of both sexes, or only one. The raising of the eyebrow had, similarly, a whole grammar and dictionary to itself.
But perhaps the most difficult and dangerous of all the sections of their language was the use of the nose in conversation. For both piety and lewdness had seized upon this obtrusive organ as their own. If a phrase or word was snuffled up through the nasal channel, it might express either gathering devotion or rising passion; only a member of the inner social circle could tell to a nicety which it meant, for the former was not often accompanied with the elevation of the eye to heaven, nor the latter with obscene gesture.
I would have abandoned the task of mastering the various grammars and dictionaries but for the enthusiasm of my tutor. He believed that nothing ever existed so much worth learning—except what were called the rotten tongues. These were two languages that had been spoken centuries before by a race now despised, if not extinct; it was a hotly discussed question who were its descendants, and, in order to avoid the awkward necessity of seeming to follow the lead of a now debased people, the usual course was to deny their existence or their connection with the sacred or rotten tongues—Thribbaty and Slapyak. The great books of their religion were studied in these; for, although it was quite a different language in which they were supposed to have been originally communicated to men, the missionaries who had established the faith in this country had spoken in either Thribbaty or Slapyak, and the ritual had been for ages written in these. A great political revolution had changed all this generations before, and the holy writings were read and the prayers and public functions performed in the vernacular. But it had become the custom for orators, wits, and men of the world to adorn their speech with words and phrases and quotations from the rotten or interred tongues, though all their best wisdom and thought had been incorporated in the native literature, and the stage of civilisation and especially ethics that they represented had long been antiquated. They had come to be the most valued shibboleth of the privileged classes, the barrier which none but the most nimble and daring wits of the mob could overleap. On them, therefore, was based all education; to their acquisition were attached all the great prizes of state. On an apt quotation from them some of the greatest reputations had been founded. By a dissertation on some obscure point of their grammar the ablest statesmen had leapt into office. They were spoken of as the highroads to greatness and power.
Recently doubt had arisen as to their sacredness, their supremacy, and their monopoly of wisdom and thought, culture and education. For many of the youth of the poor and unprivileged had begun to show great aptitude for them, whilst the gilded youth groaned under the burden of their acquisition. But the intellect of the nation was on their side, and still more the conservatism of official life, hating, as it does, to learn some new routine. So it was shown how noble they were, how fit they alone were to be true instruments of education, and how a real knowledge of the vernacular could be acquired only through them. As I read the numerous philippics against the advocates of the new learning, I felt that it would be well-nigh profanity to neglect these marvellous rotten tongues.
Once I knew how much depended on them, I entered on their acquisition with great zeal, and found it an easier task than learning the grammars and dictionaries of tone, and gesture, and facial expression. I had been bilingual in my youth, speaking in the dialect of my mother and writing literary English; and thus new languages came easily to me. My teacher swelled with pride over my progress, though I think he had little to do with it. But my success in this lessened his labours in teaching me the shadings of his own tongue, for it minimised my despair.
And something, indeed, was needed to overcome my aversion to the subtleties of their overspeech. Cautious as my pedagogue was in introducing me to new sections of it, I was almost daily stumbling into them. One day, thinking to put him into good humour, I had referred to him as a great scholar; I was startled to find him grow red as if at an insult; and he had to show me that the attitude I had been in (I had been leaning my forehead on my forefinger) had turned the word into “addlehead.” Another day I spoke of him as “well-bred,” with the same result; and he had to explain to me that, blowing my nose as I had been at the time, I had made the word mean “nincompoop.” And he had to initiate me into the whole by-play of the handkerchief; it took me days to master the infinite variety of meaning conveyed by its varied manipulation. By ladies it was not so frequently used; the scent-bottle took its place. And by its aid the gentler sex could woo, propose, and win with as great ease as the other and with far less indiscretion in word.
There was not an ornament or free appendage about fashionable dress but was brought to bear in the expression of shades of thought and emotion—the eyeglass, the key-ring, the chatelaine, the fan, the shoe-tie, the garter; the slightest motion of each of these was pregnant with meaning, and a mistake in their use might lead to serious consequences; for almost every word contained in germ senses that were often contradictory. The word for “good” also meant “feeble” or “silly,” that for “vice” also meant “pleasure.” The same word stood for “heaven” and “the purgatory of fools,” another for “well-born” and “idiot,” another for “gentlemanly” and “inconsiderate,” another for “well-mannered” and “apish,” and still another for “genius” and “lunatic.” So love and lust, fashion and gas, insult and courage, fornication and marriage, harlot and messenger of the deity, deception and artistic power, impudence and prayer, bankruptcy and good luck, illegitimacy and the legal profession, beautiful woman and hag, sage and pedant, murder and nobility, candour and credulity, sword and stigma, infallible utterance and absurd error, wise saying and despicable thing, universal religion and bigotry, worship and play the hypocrite, to please and to conjure, to knock down and to co-operate, wit and vanity, to prepare food and to embezzle, courtier and pimp, sacred rite and vexation—each of these pairs had but one expression for both.